Kitchener-based Miovision Technologies has bought Global Traffic Technologies (GTT) from the Raleigh, U.S.-based Vontier Corporation to evolve its road traffic solutions and expand its market share.
The acquisition was financed with an investment of $260 million made by three large Canadian technology investors – Maverix, Telus and Export Development Canada (EDC). This will establish Miovision as one of North America’s leading smart city equipment vendors.
Waterloo Engineering alumnus Kurtis McBride (MASc ’08, systems design engineering ) co-founded Miovision in 2005. Municipalities use the company’s technology to monitor and study traffic flows in real-time to detect patterns, improve development plans and optimize existing infrastructure such as signaling.
Opticom, GTT’s priority control solution, enables emergency vehicles to trigger signal changes as they approach intersections, giving them green light priority to get to their destinations faster and safer. The technology is used at more than 90,000 intersections in 3,100 cities globally.
With the acquisition of GTT, Miovision will be able to reach more intersections. The deal will also advance the company’s platform play business strategy, enabling other products or services to facilitate information exchanges between two or more interdependent groups such as consumers and producers.
“We’ve been talking about the smartphone in the intersection for a long time,” said McBride, Miovision’s CEO, in a company blog post. “With this acquisition, we’re going to add signal priority and emergency vehicle pre-emption to the common smartphone device which will build on applications that we’ve been providing for a long time such as data collection and detection.”
McBride's research towards his master's degree was conducted through the University's Vision and Image Processing (VIP) Lab. The VIP Lab is dedicated to understanding visual processes and finding solutions for the outstanding problems in visual processing and perception, as well as artificial intelligence, machine learning and intelligent systems for a wide variety of applications.
News update (October 20, 2023): Miovision closes its funding round with an additional $36 million bringing its total to $296 million.